Live from outer space

Middle school students communicate with astronauts via Skype

Julia Biggs • jbiggs.edwi@gmail.com

Published
9:55 am CDT, Thursday, May 24, 2018

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EDWARDSVILLE – Eighth grade students from Liberty and Lincoln Middle School participated last Friday in a live Skype video conference with two astronauts currently on the International Space Station. The NASA International Space Station In-flight Education Downlink was a part of a full day of NASA Day activities coordinated with volunteers from the Riverbend Astronomy Club, EHS Science Club, SIUE STEM Center, Boeing, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and NASA.

Dan Hartman, International Space Station Deputy Program Manager; Becky Kamas, STEM on Station Activity Manager and Carla Santiago, Deputy Education Director, were all visiting Liberty Middle School from NASA's International Space Station to ensure that the Skype video conferencing logistics were in sync with the Johnson Space Center, which was hosting the live link.

While a gymnasium full of eighth graders watched live, pre-selected eighth graders approached the mic to interact with International Space Station astronauts Ricky Arnold and Drew Feustel.

The District 7 students spent about 20 minutes asking the astronauts a variety of questions about their daily life and their work aboard the orbiting space station.

Their question and answer Skype session was aired live over NASA TV.

"It was on NASA TV live and over the next couple of days they will replay it on NASA TV. They'll end up uploading it to YouTube where it will be permanently, and they'll send a link out," Hartmann said.

"Typically we maybe do about 20 of these events a year. But since we have the extra crew member on board on, I'll say the American segment, from a crew typically of three, we went to four. That's given us more time and opportunity to do this for the students," Hartmann explained.

Edwardsville District 7 was selected for the NASA downlink from among thousands of other schools who also submitted proposals to be given this opportunity.

"I don't know of any other one in Illinois, but there's a whole selection process that these go through to get this opportunity," Hartmann explained. "Edwardsville submitted a great proposal, got evaluated and got selected."

Hartmann pointed out that there's numerous educational programs that schools can participate in through NASA.

"There's programs where high school kids build hardware that we actually use on board the International Space Station, or they will build hardware and the crew members will use it in training in Houston," he noted. "And the kids love it. It's just a very unique opportunity for them."

Hartmann emphasized how the two astronauts the students spoke to are literally on a working space station and the uniqueness of speaking to them.

"These two guys who were on the screen, Ricky and Drew, were actually outside on Wednesday performing an EVA – which is they are in their space suits and went outside the International Space Station and did some repairs on the space station," he stressed. "That's very tiresome and very grueling. They rested yesterday and got ready for this event."

Following the downlink, the Liberty and Lincoln eighth grade students broke into smaller groups and visited 19 different learning and demonstration stations the remainder of the day where they learned about things such as solar structure, flares, sunspots, black holes and gravity, supernovas, meteors, why the moon has numerous craters, asteroids and lunar mapping.

Volunteers from the Riverbend Astronomy Club, EHS Science Club, SIUE STEM Center, Boeing employees and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency employees led the activities at the stations located throughout the school.